


Off Center

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Artists, Brothers, Childbirth, Depression, Education, Family Dynamics, Fingon tries so hard to be a good big brother, Finwean family drama, Gen, Gen Work, Grief/Mourning, Helcaraxë, Middle child syndrome, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Siblings, Single Parents, Survival, Turgon isn't mad he's disappointed, and lots of subtle family devotion that Turgon misses because: major depression, art therapy, book burning, but only in connection to Ulmo and his worship, fathers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 04:10:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5115317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fingon, who was brought up to deal with family politics, would say that most of Turgon's problems result from him being the middle child of a middle child.  Turgon rather thinks, actually, that most of his problems result from <i>his cousins betraying him and his wife being dead.</i></p><p>This is a character study of Turgon: his place in the larger Finwean family, his unswaying devotion to Idril, his mourning for his wife, his relationship with the Vala Ulmo, and the development of the planning skills and artistic talent that would one day let him build the Hidden City.  </p><p>Grief brings out different facets of people, and as they forge on from the Helcaraxë to Lake Mithrim and, in Fingon's case, to Angband, Turgon's struck-dumb mourning forces his father and siblings to find the best of themselves.</p><p>(The fic is a one-shot, but there's a brief Fingolfin-focused epilogue.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Off Center

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies, Argon fans: this fic ignores Baby Brother Fingolfinion in order to more clearly set up Fingolfin and Turgon's middle-child-of-a-middle-child dynamic.
> 
> To further explain the tags, this is pure gen fic about family relationships, but it's assumed that Maedhros and Fingon are well known to be a thing, and there are hints of divine/worshipper sexual relationship between Ulmo and Turgon in the background.
> 
> The timeline is deliberately a little blurry and the depiction of early childhood development a little inconsistent, and I write Turgon and Aredhel as blondes, because I first saw them in a Ted Nasmith illustration of the _Silmarillion_ that depicted Turgon as golden-haired and they got stuck that way in my head.
> 
> I think that covers all the weird headcanon stuff. Forward! (before we all freeze to death keep moving oh god)
> 
> -

After Elenwë was taken by the ice, it was years before Turgon spoke more than a few words to anyone but his daughter.

It hurt Fingolfin most, he knew; Fingolfin had always been accustomed to share much of his mind with his second son and to have it understood. He'd taught Turgon as much of stateship as he'd taught to Fingon, and he'd spoken freely of family politics and how they pained him. Sometimes, for instance, in some excess of exasperation over Fëanor, he would say, “You are lucky that Fingon is happy to share us with you,” and Turgon understood both what he meant and what he didn't mean when he said it. Now that he found Turgon slow and spare of answer, Fingolfin must have felt like he'd lost his foremost confidant. Turgon saw this, but he could not find it in himself to venture instead of merely answer.

Elenwë must have died silent. The knife of cold on the Helcaraxë tortured an unwary hand set on the glacier's surface and burned like clouds of ground crystal in the air they breathed; the liquid death of the water that had yawned deep in the crashing crevasse, which opened so abruptly beneath her feet, would have then closed over her head with a cold that drove all voice from the spirit.

Turgon had first dedicated himself to the child's physical care, never setting her down, barely letting her skin know the touch of the air. Most of her tiny clothing had been borne by her mother, and Turgon tore his own to wrap her. His cloak grew short as he tore methodically at its edge, fashioning bindings for the golden child's hands and feet; the thin linen of a shirt made by his mother was rent into pieces which shrouded the lower half of her tiny face when he was not feeding her, soaking up the tears that accompanied her thin wails at the cold of the air and the inadequacy of the nourishment he tried to provide.

Idril had been born on the ice, had taken her first breath of this horror in Turgon's hands while Aredhel crouched behind Elenwë, trying to keep as much of the laboring woman's body lifted off the glacier as she could. The baby screamed enthusiastically at this betrayal by the world she entered – for had she not been begotten amidst the warm breezes that pooled and eddied in one of Ulmo's sacred caverns, had not Finwë's first great-granddaughter every right to expect that she might enter the same beauty a year later? – but even at her noise, a high shrilling driven from below by the beat of Elenwë's exhausted sobbing, many of the people who curled shivering on the back of the glacier did not stir. They marched for what Turgon imagined must have been days at a time. They did not stop until one of the children of Fingolfin notified their leader that those at the rear of the company would soon risk being lost.

So when Elenwë had gone, Turgon would sit cradling the child, holding her against his abdomen with his knees drawn up so he might share as much of his warmth with her as he could, and sometimes he would softly sing to her. Mostly he sang her the lyrics in praise of Ulmo. Here on this nightmare of ice, he knew that Ulmo would turn a deaf ear against hymns blocked out by the scraping, whining, crashing chant of the glacier. But these were the songs of Turgon's own joy, and he imparted them to her with a curious desperation, thinking that perhaps if he, too, perished here on the ice and his daughter survived, the tunes might one day sound familiar to her.

Others would come closer, bereft of vigor in their exhaustion and cold, but still hungry to hear something that was not the underlying rumble of the seaborne ice. Turgon would fall asleep last, still upright, but often bolstered in his effort to make his child a bed by a pile of those who huddled close like seals, regardless of former affections and alliances, trying to keep each other warm.

Once, Idril cried out not in infant fury or ageless misery, but in wonder. Turgon had watched her eyes learn to focus upon him, then upon Fingolfin, Fingon, and Aredhel when they stood helpless behind their grieving kinsman, but today her pale blue eyes looked farther. He raised his head and saw lights flashing amongst the stars. Green as glass and flushed as roses they were, dancing like the water's gleam upon the sea-cave walls when he'd tarried with Ulmo who loved him, but cast by unseen waters and unseen lights in a sky beyond reckoning of height. Father and daughter watched the lights together, and then Turgon sang his daughter a new song, his voice stronger than it had been. He sang her a half-remembered song about how Ulmo had first striven against the changes Melkor wrought in his waters, but then perceived that terrible cold could make the snowflake and the frost, and saw how beautiful these things were. Ulmo himself had taught Turgon this song when Turgon served him at the banks of the sea, and the parts that Turgon had not understood in the Vala's deep and stirring voice, he made anew to teach to his child.

Idril had been intended to be born in Middle-Earth; Turgon and Elenwë had discussed the time that remained, and there had been time enough that they might accompany their family away from Valinor. But it had taken hours to realize that the red glow of the fire, so far over the horizon that only a dim ruddy light could be seen, meant they had been abandoned. Turgon had already lost track of the time when the Helcaraxë had opened before them – partly because Elenwë had kept insisting it was not yet time for the babe to be born. He realized now how long she'd been lying to him, how long holding off the birth by force of will and panic, until it was too late to turn back and they'd traveled so far toward the terrible crossing that none of them would survive being left alone in the dark with a newborn. Turgon thought it had been perhaps only days after they first began their despairing march across the ice that Idril arrived, but with the Trees that had marked their days gone, how could he know?

She was old enough to begin to say nonsense back to him when he spoke or, more often, sang to her by the time the world resumed a cycle of day and night – harsher in the light and dimmer in the darkness than the Light of the Trees had been, but time resumed its meaning even for Turgon, whose suffering had narrowed his world to Idril. The host of Fingolfin began to think, as the new sun so-slightly amended the torturous chill, that they might survive instead of dropping one by one to the ice in their exhaustion. And Idril was old enough to kick in startlement, grabbing at a strand of her father's hair, when Turgon's boots first encountered earth instead of ice, and he stopped still, raising his head to look at the strange world ahead.

He'd had his child in at least one arm, never once setting her down, since Elenwë died. She had been born to the Grinding Ice, but she had never touched it. Turgon found his way to one of the trees, his steps far from straight; knelt before it, and laid his daughter on the earth.

They both slept there that night and all the next day, Aredhel and Fingon coming to curl beside him and fall into the same exhausted doze. It was still bitingly cold, but the ground did not steal the warmth from their bodies as the ice had done, and the three of them lay unmoving, sometimes vaguely aware of their surroundings before falling back into unconsciousness. Once Turgon woke to find his father beside them, too, sitting upright with his head listing against the tree, fast asleep, but with one hand tenderly tangled in Turgon's pale hair as though Turgon were the small child. Idril slept and woke in the manner of babes, as her father saw when he came awake to check on her, but comforted enough by the heartbeat which had been at her side almost all her life, she lay quiet, staring about her as her family took their long-awaited respite.

And then, suddenly, there was much to do other than merely walk forward.

Turgon had once spent time at his grandfather's court, fascinated by the small business that demanded the attention of someone who knew how to oversee a city; he'd been granted a counselor's role in time. There was call for this work now, but Turgon found no joy in it; he wouldn't learn to be excited by these decisions again for hundreds of years. The knowledge of the need was too great, and though he showed as much talent as his brother did for thinking through the means by which the host of Fingolfin might continue to draw together and survive, he neither shirked the work nor enjoyed it. 

Then again, he had also been accustomed to spending much of his time in sea-caves and along shorelines that were lonely and wild even though they bordered Valinor itself. Turgon had explored and discovered with Ulmo's unseen grace guiding him safely over rocks and through caverns, and it was usually when he'd found a beautiful secret, some hidden grotto or deep pool unsuspected, that his Valar lord had appeared to him in the terrible but lovely elven shape that he so rarely adopted, that Turgon had been so privileged to see. Now his people could make much use of a skilled scout and mapmaker – and this work Turgon took with a pale phantom of his old relish, but not because it held so much more joy than the business of keeping their people alive and as comfortable as could be hoped.

He liked the exploring because it gave him something to tell Idril about at the end of the day. At first, he would speak to her of what he had found while she lay in his arms, looking up at him with a trust that threatened to break the pieces of his already-shattered heart – once they'd left the Helcaraxë, Turgon had allowed himself to become aware that his child had been malnourished to the point of tragedy, days away from a miserable death in the cold. He did not quite feel that he deserved the obvious affection that shone in her eyes when she easily picked out his face or voice, finding him at once even when the group held only their own family.

As they slowly traveled deeper into the wild new land they had given so much to escape to, they began to find and occupy the camps left behind by Fëanor's people. Turgon showed a skill for finding them. He didn't notice, not until Fingon gently pointed it out to him, that he usually found such places by approaching from the waterside. Turgon said nothing in response. Fingon didn't wait for him to speak.

With some shelter they might take up for their own, they were somewhat safer. Turgon still worked to learn what he could about Beleriand – but he had to confess that more and more, his motivation was that he might bring things back for Idril. He found stray feathers, and twigs laden with leaves or berries or thorns, and once a whole bird's nest with one failed egg still in it; he brought them back to his dwelling eager to hear the soft pat of small feet as Idril made her shaky way to the door to meet him, to see her humble gift and be taught its name.

More and more of his energy went to bringing up his daughter. Before she was old enough to climb a tree, he taught her to sing all the lore-songs he'd learned at Finwë's knee in Valinor. It was said that her voice, when she sang the old hymns to Ulmo, was as clear and pure as the breeze upon the sea. Turgon would only bow his head a moment when people said this to him, but he began to see that his father's people's discomfort with the songs faded over time. They began to remember that despite Ulmo's friendship with Manwë, he had not stopped their ears to the music of the water.

“Ulmo's faithfulness is as deep as his mystery,” Turgon would answer once, and people looked at him in surprise to hear him speak – he, who had been thought one of the most eloquent of the house of Finwë! – but he also saw that they listened when he spoke, paying an attention that they had not paid to the second son of the second son in Valinor.

He read to Idril from what books remained to them – poor things of sticking paper wrapped in rough cloth – read her every word, and then told her from memory what was in the parts that were missing, tried to explain to her why such a passage or such a chapter had been thought important to preserve against their uttermost need, why such a chapter had been chosen first to warm them on the ice instead of to enlighten them. In time Idril grew old enough to object and to disagree with the choices they had made. Turgon encouraged her to discuss it with him, and once pointed out to her that a particular torn-away leather cover had briefly protected her own tiny feet. She laughed at this knowledge, but she wept a little when he told her that he'd also warmed her small hands over the few painted scrolls he'd chosen to carry to Middle-Earth with him, destroying views he had thought he and Elenwë would later wish to cherish. Drying her tears when she saw they distressed him, Idril asked him to describe the paintings – every detail he recalled, how he had rendered the brushstrokes, captured or failed to capture the subject's reality. They spent multiple nights at this, and he felt some of the ice that seemed always to have clung to his heart after the Helcaraxë fall away.

It was when, years after their parting at Alqualondë, the host of Fingolfin finally caught up to the sons of Fëanor that the things lurking beneath the ice began to show themselves.

He barely restrained himself from leaping for their throats when he saw them at their first brief, tense parley. He stood with his knuckles white around the sturdy quarterstaff he'd begun to favor as a weapon. Through his rage – through his raw _disappointment_ – he heard someone whisper _Elenwë_ , and he met the eyes of Caranthir and saw him suddenly grow pale. He heard the whisper of his dead wife's name so loudly that Fingon's unfettered cry of grief, inches from his ear, seemed distant.

The nightmares came then, bursting through the cracks of his mind like water through broken ice, and he told Idril he wished her to spend some time learning from Aredhel so that he would not wake her when he came abruptly awake almost every night, sometimes calling out in low and strangled tones, shivering with a cold that would not leave him until he left his dwelling to see that they stood on the earth and not upon the glacier. And then Fingon was gone, for days, for weeks, and he wanted to execute all five remaining sons of Fëanor in their sleep, and sometimes he would find himself on the shores of Lake Mithlim staring across the mist-wreathed water at the place where they lay, not knowing how he'd gotten there, but shivering in a cold he knew he didn't really feel.

Occasionally he would wake with Fingolfin asleep in a chair beside him again, sometimes brought out of sleep with fingers lightly resting on his hair. Turgon was speaking more now, if less eloquently than before, but he never confessed what he now knew: that his father spent his own most difficult nights at his younger son's side, stealing away before morning so no one of Fingolfin's people would know how much their leader needed the comfort of behaving like a father whose child had been frightened by a fireside tale, and not broken by the death that had stalked them from Valinor.

And then Fingon was back, bearing the wreckage of their oldest cousin.

Turgon almost refused to embrace his brother in a fit of fury over his rashness, but he remembered at the last instant what terrible memories that would revive for Fingolfin. Instead he told Fingon, “I am proud of your valor, my brother, but I may never forgive you for leaving us even as I sing your praises,” and he saw something startling in his people's eyes: He'd regained the power to state what others were thinking and to make it known.

The nightmares didn't quite stop, but soon he felt that he could explain them to Idril sufficiently that the child could dwell with him again. He could explain them to Aredhel, too; he'd become aware that she resented how he'd shut her out of Idril's infancy in his grief, then abruptly given her responsibility for the girl while she, too, feared for their brother, and he was able to tell her why he'd done it - even to say, "I thought once I should have dropped her to go after Elenwë, and I've hardly borne to put her down since" - and ask his sister's forgiveness. And soon after that, he was out on yet another mission of finding and charting, and he came across a slender tree whose bark did not match those he'd seen in Valinor – but for the first time he was sufficiently in possession of all his senses at once to notice that its sap had the sweet, beeswax smell of the resin he used to use as a binder when he wished for a soft, spreading paint.

He collected as much as he could without fearing to harm the tree, then turned around to see that he stood in an entire grove of them, their skin and shape altered to suit the trajectory of the new sun, but the blood that coursed through their hearts the very resin he needed. There was a spring, too, nearby, and for the first time since he'd left Valinor, Turgon trailed his fingers in the water and spoke a homage directly to Ulmo. There was no response, but it comforted him anyway.

Back in his small, rude room, he prepared a springing roll of the paper they'd learned to make from berry wood and the fibers of lakeside reeds in the absence of calfskin to make vellum. The hide of a squirrel, tanned that it might make a glove, furnished hair enough for a brush; wood for handles was not now in short supply. But what should he paint?

He embarked on his composition with the intention of painting the view over the lake. He'd always been fond of rendering landscapes, skillfully creating a breathtaking illusion of depth upon the surface. But soon he found that his hand was moving with more purpose, darting over the page.

He painted Elenwë, dressed in the light regalia of a Vanyarin bride as he'd seen her on their wedding day, with golden hair rendered in a wash of barberry falling loose below a crown of flowers picked out in dark writing ink; but he painted not the shining tenderness he'd seen her show on that day, but the proud fear in her eyes as she first looked upon their daughter. As though something in him had broken loose, he reached for the next roll of paper, weighed it down with small rocks, and went on.

He hid what he'd been doing, smudging some of the scrolls in his pains to conceal them before the pigments dried. But every day, when he was weighted with the knowledge of how much tension existed in his family and how much they all needed each other, he would close himself in his dwelling and paint. He painted his father as he looked when he was asleep, both peaceful and in pain. His old eloquence returned to him, and people began to look up at once when they heard his voice. He painted Fingon's dark braids, which had once been wound with gold but now were knotted with leather, and the way that they fell with protective grace over red hair cropped too cruelly short. He stood to the left hand of his father during painful parleys with the sons of Fëanor, who still dwelt estranged on the far side of the lake, but whose own agony was almost contagious in its sincerity. He painted waves in endless light-washed shades of malachite and blue frit, their foamy edge outlining fingers that reached for golden-cream locks of hair. He recalled the lessons in statecraft he'd had from Fingolfin and from Finwë, and he began to speak more boldly in council – and was surprised to see that nearly as often as he spoke, their people did as he said. He painted a slim and youthful figure bent in pain, and the shadowy echo of an identical one beside it, a mere silhouette outlined in painted smoke. He began to remember more than Elenwë's last moments when he dreamed of her.

The time that Idril came to him in their room. Light slanting across the rough floor, foretelling that the new sun and moon which had brought the change of seasons would circle back to the promise of summer. Small bare feet on the dark boards and the earth that welled up in the gaps as they half-rotted, half-cured below them. Idril's golden hair that was beginning to betray her Vanyar heritage as, unlike his own straight tresses, the locks began to curl slightly at the ends.

“Ada,” Idril asked, “Haru wants to know what you're doing – what are you doing?” Her childish surprise made him turn fully around in his chair.

“I am painting,” he told her.

“What are you painting?”

He looked at his scrolls. “Things I need to remember,” he said, “and things that will help me know what to forget.”

Idril raised an eyebrow at him, an expression copied uncannily from Aredhel. His beautiful child – not quite Aredhel in her ways, and not quite Elenwë in her looks, and far beyond his own abilities, he began to think, in her ability to understand other people. Was there any better calling in the world than to teach her all the knowledge he possessed? Than to watch her surpass what he knew?

 _One day,_ he thought, _if Ulmo loves me still, I may have a chance to thank her mother for this gift._

“But I have run out of red,” he explained to her, “and I must make more.” He extended a hand. “Would you like me to teach you how?”


	2. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still not quite sure this moment belongs to this story, but Turgon insists it be appended.

Fingolfin wears the crown of the Noldor now, and he wears it well. Turgon thinks privately that it looks well on him precisely because it's some incongruous -- the glow of its stones upon Finwë's brow in Valinor and its gleam in the bloody torchlight when Fëanor persuaded them all to follow in the madness of this journey seem caught there in the metal now that Fingolfin wears it by the light of the Sun. Something of their history as a people has passed now to Fingolfin – and he must bear the burden of choices made before him.

Fingon looks on the verge of actually begging to go to Maedhros – Turgon isn't too wrapped up in his own processing of this change to know how this abjection must have degraded the sons of Fëanor, so how much more must Fingon's compassion for his beloved be cutting him? – and Fingolfin waves him away with a hand. “Go.”

It seems he almost says something. Then he just goes. 

Idril lets go of her father's hand and turns to march after him in the determined way of the small. Turgon half-turns after her, but Aredhel rolls her eyes and says, “I shall get her,” and peels off too. Of course; she must be eager to see Celegorm again, now that politics dictate that she can.

Then it's only Turgon and his father, walking together back to the small, rude house which is now the house of the king, a golden figure and a dark one arrayed now in what's left of the Noldorin regalia. 

They're indoors before Fingolfin's shoulders slump; he reaches up with shaking fingers to lift off the crown and look at it, fingering the metal as though he touches still the brow of his father. He looks up with wondering eyes at his second son, and Turgon quietly brings his hand to his shoulder in salute.

Then suddenly there are tears in Fingolfin's eyes – just as suddenly the composure he's held on to throughout deserts him, and suddenly he's cast the crown aside to lie uncared-for upon a rough table. He reaches blindly for Turgon, and as Turgon hastens to step into his embrace, the new High King of the Noldor is sobbing like a child.

“Those scum,” he says, his voice now not angry but only wounded, “those bastards,” he repeats the insults that he's never let fall when his rage was in him, “how can they? _This doesn't bring my brother back_.”

He says more, but his voice is too choked by tears to understand, and Turgon can only repay the deepest debt he's known as he pulls his father close, his hands trying to be strong against the king's shoulders as Fingolfin finally lets himself cry.


End file.
